703.  Old Town sidewalk, Bern. The buildings of the central "Old Town" district of Bern date from the 1600s and 1700s. The medieval style cleverly included sidewalks inclosed by open arches and covered by a 2nd-floor extension. A pedestrian can walk across much of the town in rain or snow without getting wet, and on hot summer afternoons, the recessed stone sidewalks remain cool and shady. We should be so smart today! (2009.) (Copyright William K. Hartmann).

702.   Near Reichenbach Falls, Meiringen. The painting shows a meadow within earshot of the falls, above and behind the viewer. Quiz: Why are Reichenbach Falls famous? Answer: Sherlock Holmes's saga ended when he went over the falls with his arch enemy, Professor Moriarty, and disappeared. The nearby town of Meiringen is crazy about Holmes, and has a museum and statue in the town park, dedicated to him. I spent a beautiful spring afternoon painting among the blossoming fruit trees. (2009.) (Copyright William K. Hartmann).

692.  October in Bern. This is a view from the balcony of an apartment that I rented on several occasions, in the "Old Town" part of the city (see lower left quadrant of painting 565). The view shows fall color and the river Aare. (2008.) (Copyright William K. Hartmann).

688.   The castle at Spietz. The "castle" is a large medieval hall in the town of Speitz, viewed here from a hillside vineyard above the town. I finished the painting in a light rain, and escaped to the nearby train station, a short walk away. (2008.) (Copyright William K. Hartmann).

653. Tuesday on the Rhein. An artist friend, Arthur Woods, organized a picnic ride on his small boat, near his house at Stein am Rhein. People were out lazily rowing on the river. The painting was made on site. (2006.) (Copyright William K. Hartmann).

641.   Counntryside near Bern. This hilltop view looks down into farm fields in the countryside about half an hour by train from downtown Bern. I painted the scene when one of our science teams from the International Space Institute made a Saturday outing for a walkabout and picnic in the countryside. (2006.) (Copyright William K. Hartmann).

640.  View of Old Town Bern across the Aare River. One cold weekend I walked down the street from my apartment, across the bridge, and down the footpath that runs along the Aare. (The footpath is visible in the views from the apartment window, #692 and #565. My apartment window is one of the upper ones just to the right of the cathedral.) I picked a spot and worked on this view of the Old Town until my hands were shaking from the cold. As I left, I discovered a sign that the Bern artist, Paul Klee, had picked a spot only tens of meters away to make a famous sketch of Bern, sold now on post cards. (2006.) (Copyright William K. Hartmann).

565.  Evening in Bern. This is a view from my apartment window and balcony, wider-angle than the view in #692. This is a great example of a case where the view in reality is spectacular at various times of day -- the sky, the clouds, the river, the building -- but very hard to compose into a good painting. The reason, in my mind, is that this wide angle view has many elements but no center, while a tighter view like #692 makes a better-composed painting, but misses the spectacular setting. I had short-term living in this apartment for several years before I attempted a painting, and I still have no answer to the problem. (2002.) (Copyright William K. Hartmann).

564. View of Davos. This is the famous site of ski holidays, G-8 economic summits, and other such earth-shaking affairs. Our geophysical conference was shoehorned in, for cheap, during the off-season in 2002. Among the mountains, we talked about Mars. Off season in Davos is still spectacular, and the scene was especially meaningful to me because my grandfather, the painter Andreas (Andrew) Hartmann (see webpage) came from a village in the mountains near here. I painted from a terrace outside a museum devoted to the Swiss artist, Ernst Kirchner. (2002.) (Copyright William K. Hartmann).